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An Immense World
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About This Book
A grand tour through the hidden realms of animal senses that will transform the way you perceive the world--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes. The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved. In An Immense World, author and acclaimed science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.
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Reviews
"Yong's book is funny and elegantly written, mercifully restrained when it comes to jargon ..."
"[Yong's] new book aims to open our eyes to another unseen world...From ultraviolet vision to echolocation, by way of those singing mice, it examines the world of animal senses that extend beyond the limits of our own...It is a delight...Some nonhuman senses are outlandish — a little scary, even...Catfish have taste buds all over their body; if you licked one, Yong observes, 'you'd taste each other'...Rattlesnakes 'see' thermal radiation given off by animals...Seals can hunt down a fish 200 yards away, following its wake through the water with their whiskers...Dolphins use clicks for echolocation, like bats, and can perform an ultrasound examination of their prey so fine-grained that they can differentiate between otherwise identical canisters of water and alcohol...Yong makes heroic efforts to try to understand how any of this might feel...Yong calls his book a 'call for humility,' and it did fill me with a certain awe...But it goes further...Subtly — Yong is never heavy-handed — it prompts a radical rethink about the limits of what we know — what the world is, even...It is quite a book...And, I felt, putting it down, quite a world."
"swells into philosophy and politics, underscoring the urgency of climate change."
"It is also a tour of places that are, in essence, unknowable."
"This rich and deeply affectionate travelogue of animal sensory wonders ends with a plea to us—noisy, light-polluting anthropoid apes—to stop and consider others' needs: for silence, for darkness, for space."
"It's a magnificent achievement."
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